Meaningful Mobilities: The Experience of Underground Travel in the Buenos Aires Subte, 1913-1944

Abstract

The paper explores the experience of travelling on Buenos Aires' Underground Railways (Subte) during the first decades of the twentieth-century. Reconstructing representations of passengers and their experiences through visual and textual sources, the paper shows how this underground mobility was a meaningful practice that expressed ambivalent sentiments towards progress and the rhythm of modern urban life. On the one hand, there was popular fascination with new technologies as well as a celebration and exaltation of this encapsulated mobility as a rational organisation of space in relation to time. On the other hand, the Subte was criticised as a form of regimentation and dehumanisation which turned passengers into automatons.